STIPULATION ONE: You must appreciate and accept the brilliance of Brad Neely (stipulation rider: this is not Brad Neely’s work; this is his real life counterpart).

STIPULATION TWO: You must have spent your formative years playing either 16, 32 or 64-bit video games.

STIPULATION THREE: You must have an unbending patience and a predisposition to character study.

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In short, this link chronicles a 45 year-old man’s work to record his reviews of 1990’s video games. He speaks in full, shunted sentences, often qualifying his nouns with the adjectives “outstanding” and “cool.” He decries Mario Kart for its lack of story elements. He cites Gex as being impossible to defeat without the aid of the Game Genie. He enunciates all his consonants with the sting of the autistic.

Wash yourself in the basin of nostalgia, and curdle in the audio of the absurd. I admit to having watched all of these reviews; I began drunk Saturday night and woke up sober Sunday morning. At the end, I heard my thoughts in his voice, and all I could think was that Donkey Kong Country 2 is one of the Coolest games around!

Begin with Final Doom, then move to the Fantastic Four and A Bug’s Life reviews. If you don’t still don’t believe me, you must not enjoy watching public access. Because I fucking love it.

I grew up thinking that Alex Trebek was a smart great man whose brilliance and knowledge of the earth could be contained in no volume or tome. I held unknowingly tight to this understanding for what’s almost certainly years, but today I considered this understanding to no longer be true. And I watched as one more steadfast absolute to which I have desperately clung after abandoning God and Christ slowly floated away.

Alex Trebek is not a smart man; in all likelihood, he is a dumb man. He is not a mathematician or a diamond professor. Alex Trebek is a game show host. He doesn’t know the answers to the questions he asks. Instead, he reads the knowledge off cards, cards handed to him by a sweating fat man in a small, small suit who gives him his lies in the darkness. Profane, undying darkness.

Alex Trebek does cocaine. Terrific amounts of cocaine. This is one of his cherished nighttime activities, long after the buzzers and grey suits stop applauding. With shutters drawn, Alex Trebek sits in his horizon wide mansion and ingests cocaine en masse. He does not read books and dictionaries. He does not make flash cards.

Ho! There is Alex, in the Caribbean, with a nose full of cocaine and an arm full of tan women. These women wear bikinis in bright, primary colors and often avoid eye contact when speaking. They are all inside a cigarette boat. They are floating in international waters.

“Hand me my sunning oils and bottle of Whiskey Galore!” Alex bawls from the middle of the sea. The girl in the Fuschia bikini huddles over to the Cooler and pulls out a large, unwieldy bottle full of Alex’s terrifying home concoction. None but Alex may drink it. A small label lays askance on the browning surface of the bottle; he drinks with open eyes, staring out at the sun.

“Goddamn! Goddamn!” this New alex screams. Few people hear his cries.

—-

I felt like an uncle died, a happy, smiling uncle who never hurt an animal and never owned a pet. It was a funny comfort, certainly, but in the back of my hat I always knew that if I were sad or bored or waiting in a doctor’s office I could watch in gaping awe as Alex spewed out knowledge like a sage.

Yes, gone is the man who was better than a president. Displaced, forgotten, this Alex that Was glued outsider art in his country home and bought meals for the homeless and Racial Minorities. He sprinkled grass on the ground and cried for all the crime. This man, this Novaman, is dead.

And good riddance! He was a figure – a phantom! He was the abstraction of an ideal shook loose from the Coconut Tree. And in his untrue place I have found reality. Grandiloquent, cocaine reality.

BLOGGO-NOTE: “Photo and Song” will be an ongoing series. A photo I’ve taken will be placed ablogside a song I’ve written, almost definitely that night. These songs will often stop abruptly. This is not because I have perished mid-composition; it is because I’ve chosen not to write anymore.

Most often, I begin to write a song because I am all out of drugs and have no more. So, when I’ve used up all my drugs, you’ll doubtless find another Photo and Song entry up. This is called a Lifestyle Cue.

After years of dutiful skystudying and tempered perseverance, I have finally become an astronaut and have had my photo entered into the Astronaut Tome of Ages. Truly, never have I felt so exalted, so esteemed, so expertly alive as I do at this very moment. MIR is only days away. I plot its temporal movement on my Skybacus.

Have you ever had a dream accomplished? An ambition, achieved? Then you must also be an astronaut. And if that is true, we will prepare for MIR together. We will join hands and achieve with intention – our body heat expended will power small gymnasiums and tiny countries.

To feel the hundreds of gallons of fuel beneath your body quiver with anticipation as lift-off looms, to feel the nuts and bolts shake with decade-old uncertainty, Yea, the astronaut’s life is truly ripe with promise and passion. Yet who among us, who, have the brilliance, the reserve to dedicate themselves to that fruit in the sky? I do. And I have.

Never again will I eat Eggs for breakfast, Ha! Perhaps before The Vision, but not now, not ever again. No, an astronaut must have Wild Boar for every morning’s start. For when the sun rises in Space, the sun rises true, and nothing less than Boar will suffice. Lest you want I should drop my SpaceNines-Screw sent plummeting back to earth with screaming red Atmo-fire during routine and treacherous off-satellite camera lens filter adjustments? Ha! Eggs, I bid ye not!

…

And yet, there is a loneliness I sense, an understanding of the days to come. I can sense it building, signaling to the horizon like the encroaching Pre-MIR Mandatory H-1200 Anti-Decompression-Flight Chamber, for the loneliness is hungry, and demands its forthright meal. But after eating its fill, gorging on promise and kindness and flight discipline, only one creature waits for more; after the dishes have been cleared, it is only Madness that rests at the table of Space. The Madness of the Astronaut. Truly, truly an astronaut’s life is not free; yet to know the cost of Space is to unequivocally accept the burden, the path same as once walked Christ the Savior.

As the great and wise Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “I dwell at the foot of my height. How high are my peaks? No one has told me yet.” But someone has told me; NASA. For Space is my muse, and Astronaut is my name.